Why The Neutralist? The term Isolationist implies a narrow Fortress America outlook and is used as an epithet. The term Neutralist does not indicate someone hiding out from the world. No one calls the Swiss isolationists.
The Wilsonian world view is old, tired and wrong. Our interventions have been less and less successful and now the failure can no longer be covered up.

Monday, February 20, 2017

John McCain has it in for President Trump. He has in public consistently proclaimed his disdain for the president. It is hard not to ask, "what's his problem?"By any objective measure, Big Media has ganged up on Trump. So The Donald has asked Congress to write laws outlawing the press. Due to this flagrant anti-constitutional initiative, the ever heroic Senator McCain has come to the defense of our civic order.

"They get started by suppressing free press, in other words, a consolidation of power -- when you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press," McCain said. "And I'm not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I'm just saying we need to learn the lessons of history."

The only problem is, Trump did not ask congress to suppress free press. The sniveling MCCain was responding to Trump's tweet

The Donald is stating an opinion and hardly smashing the presses. The Arizona Senator was being cute.

Trump was not The Neutralist's candidate. We preferred Rand Paul. Actually, our heart will always be with his dad and Rand flipped the flop a bit before he exited the primary campaign. One thing he has though, is John McCain's number.

Senator
Paul said on a TV appearance we are “very lucky” that Trump is president and not McCain,

Heck,
even though Obama turned out to be a drone warrior, we are lucky that McCain
did not beat even him.

Rand
says McCain has a “personal dispute”
with the president over foreign policy.

“Everything that he says about the president
is colored by his own personal dispute he’s got running with President Trump,
and it should be taken with a grain of salt, because John McCain’s the guy
who’s advocated for war everywhere,” Paul said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“He
would bankrupt the nation. We’re very lucky John McCain’s not in charge,
because I think we’d be in perpetual war,” Paul added.

(Love ya, Rand, but if you haven't noticed, we are in perpetual war)

“I would say John McCain’s been wrong on just
about everything over the last four decades. He advocated for the Iraq War,
which I think destabilized the Middle East,” Rand, also said.

“If
you look at the map, there’s probably at least six different countries where
John McCain has advocated for us having boots on the ground,”

Go
Rand, you could step into your dad’s shoes someday if you keep this up.

There
is more to the McCain problem, however.
On Boston Herald Radio last week, Massachusetts Congressman Bill Keating
said,

John McCain certainly is one of the most knowledgeable
foreign affairs people and particularly when it comes to Russia. And he’s advancing this to what extent he’ll
be able to do it I don’t know but he seems to me on the senate side a person
that’s clearly putting partisan issues aside and dealing with the issue
directly.

Now Mr. Keating, like the rest of the Bay State delegation
have not a non-partisan bone in their bodies.
We can translate what he said into English as , “I hate Trump and am
willing to ally with someone I am not too keen on to do our dirty work.”

The Neutralist may be getting the nuances a little bit
wrong, but it is close enough.

The real question is what drives McCain?

Is he just crazy?

Is he getting some instructions from Neocon Central?

What is going on in that head?

If you have an answer, Please let the Neutralist know.

To finish off, we have always wondered why people who were
for the Iraq war are listened to by anyone.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Kim Jong Un gets it. He knows that if he gave up his nukes he would be soon meeting with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. So during the Trump-Abe love fest, he sets off one of his one of his supposedly more advanced firecrackers and puts the two Mar-a-Lago dinner companions in a tizzy. They had to come up with a joint statement by the lights of their cell phones.The Japanese head of government said, "naughty, naughty" and our man said "we love Japan." Okay, that's not what they said, but the actual verbiage is not much different in substance. It never really is.We really have not solved the North Korea problem and what we are doing is not the answer.Consortium News has a better idea. Maybe we should try negotiating with the lad instead of more sanctions. They haven't worked too many places.Or maybe, we should just say au revoir?Doug Bandow, Senior Cato Institute Fellow, has a blog column at Forbes and the title is, "As Korean Peninsula Gets Weirder And Less Stable U.S. Should Head For The Exits."According to Mr. Bandow,

"But the threat is largely self-induced. That is, Washington could easily deflate the fantastic nightmare of a North Korean nuclear attack on America by leaving the Korean Peninsula."

Bandow further states

Which leaves the debate over U.S. policy in full swing in Washington. Doing nothing is not a good option. The North would just continue to develop missiles and nukes. It already may have enough material for about 20 weapons. Some estimates have Pyongyang possessing 50 or even 100 weapons within a few years. Sticking around Northeast Asia while passively watching events would be foolish at best, dangerous at worst.

So, saying au revoir is the best option. That is, of course, the Neutralist's default option.You are saying what about our ally to the south.We have done well by South Korea. They are a smart and talented nation and have gotten to flood us with their phones and cars, but maybe they should face the future by themselves.Kim Jong Un is a lot less crazy than the country that does not know when to leave.

Thursday, February 09, 2017

John Yoo has an op-ed piece in the New York Times, you know the scandal sheet that features the merger of neoliberals and neoconservatives to bomb countries and then bring their suffering populations here.Mr. Yoo, in the Bush administration, claimed the president could legally engage in torture. One would think the great and good might move away from the man who. according to Jon Schwarz of the intercept,

Yoo’s legal reasoning, as
he (together with his superior Jay Bybee, who’s now a federal judge) advised the Bush White House, is that “the Department of Justice
could not enforce Section 2340A [the federal probation against torture] against
federal officials acting pursuant to the President’s constitutional authority
to wage a military campaign.” In other words, the president can’t crush a
6-year-old boy’s testicles for fun, but if he thinks some
child-testicle-crushing is needed to win the war, it’s totally
constitutional.

You too might have thought that the world would have distanced itself from John Yoo, but no, he found a nice spot as a professor at Berkeley. Wonder what he feels about his place of employment as that Madrassa has no problem with masked thugs suppressing speech.The good professor's piece at the Times notes his misgivings about our new president.Yoo has a problem with Mr. Trump on a few constitutional points.

Immigration has driven Mr. Trump even deeper into the constitutional thickets. Even though his executive order halting immigration from seven Muslim nations makes for bad policy, I believe it falls within the law. But after the order was issued, his adviser Rudolph Giuliani disclosed that Mr. Trump had initially asked for “a Muslim ban,” which would most likely violate the Constitution’s protection for freedom of religion or its prohibition on the state establishment of religion, or both — no mean feat. Had Mr. Trump taken advantage of the resources of the executive branch as a whole, not just a few White House advisers, he would not have rushed out an ill-conceived policy made vulnerable to judicial challenge.

So we bomb and torture people in MENA and Yoo is okay with that. Those folks may not harbor affection for us and understandably may want to harm us. The new president may believe that Muslims from disaffected regions may want to do that. Is that in the "constitutional thickets?"
If he were to proscribe the Muslim faith for all who are here legally and are citizens, no one would contest that that was unconstitutional. People who are not here, well that is another story, and a full complement of the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter, but the idea itself is not at all outside the bounds of reason.

On December 1, The then president-elect outlined his foreign policy,

"We will destroy ISIS. At the same time, we
will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the
past. We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments,
folks," Trump told attendees at the U.S. Bank Arena. "Our goal is
stability, not chaos because we wanna rebuild our country. It's time."

"In our dealings with other countries, we
will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace,
understanding, and good will."

I am not sure if Trump completely means this. Rumors of nominating Elliott Abrams as Deputy Secretary of State are not reassuring. Nevertheless, the quote, while not neutralist, is a better sentiment than anything Mr. Yoo or any neocon has ever come up with.

The Neutralist Manisfesto

The United States should move to a neutral foreign policy. Troops, fleet and air forces should be withdrawn from foreign countries and only our own border secured.

The term Isolationist implies a narrow Fortress America outlook and is used as an epithet. The term Neutralist does not indicate someone hiding out from the world. No one calls the Swiss isolationists. The Wilsonian world view is old, tired and wrong. Our interventions have been less and less successful and now the failure can no longer be covered up

What is to be expected

What is to be expected from the Neutralist? Unfortunately, not much. There are think tanks galore in this country for all shades of thought, but, so far, neutralism is an orphan with only one known supporter. The concept is tied up with the I word, Isolationism. To get noticed and be taken seriously will be next to impossible.

What is hoped? That the idea of neutralism will be noticed and that the concept of Wilsonian Internationalism will be seen as the failure it is. That at least a core group will form that will support the idea and spread it in blogs, articles and conversation. To get even that far would be near miraculous.

Links Policy

Any link to any site does not imply that the linkee approves of the Neutralist or its policy.

The Neutralist will try to link to sites it deems to be generally sympathetic to non interventionism.

We reserve the right to link because someone had one article or even a part of an article or post we liked.

We also reserve the right to link to sights we completely disagree with.